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Cage Against The Machine

New Anti X Factor Campaign Records Silence

07/12/2010

Elizabeth Alker

An new anti X Factor campaign has been launched to beat this year's X Factor winner in the race to Christmas Number One.

Madness star Suggs and dance acts Orbital and Pendulum are amongst the musicians heading up the campaign and last night they recorded John Cage's experimental work 4'33" - the sound of musicians doing nothing - at a studio in Soho London.

Suggs told 6 Music News reporter Matt Everitt: 'It is possibly the best 4'33" of silence I have ever produced."

It's hoped this recording of silence will emulate the success of Rage Against The Machine, who, last year, kept X Factor winner Joe McElderry off the Christmas top spot with their 1992 track Killing In The Name.

The campaign, which has been dubbed Cage Against the Machine currently has 62,000 Facebook fans and the odds at Ladbrokes for the track to be number one this Christmas are 8-1.

Producer Paul Epworth, the man behind albums by Adele and Friendly Fires, has been drafted into to producer Cage Against The Machine and he told us exactly what this composition is all about: "Despite what people think, it's not a recording of silence as such. It's a recording of a piece where all the performers are playing a rest. So it is actually the sound of a group of performers playing nothing."

"It is possibly one of the best 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence I have ever produced" Suggs (Madness)

Dan Le Sac and Scroobious Pip were one of the acts present at the recording and they explained how it felt to be part of the staged silence: "You start off in that initial stage, thinking, 'I've got to be quiet'.

"Then you just listen to the room, to people shuffling and the sound of the amp. Then you get to the stage where you're just listening to yourself and your own thoughts and you forget you're in a room full of people."

Mr Hudson was another artist involved in the recording and he told 6 Music News why he decided to get on board: "When you first hear about it you think it's a joke. But how often do we have four minutes and 33 second just to think and to listen, he said.

"It was going to go one of two ways; either someone was going to get everyone giggling or we were all going to take it seriously. And, I think we all know that behind this there is some serious work to be done raising money for charity and everyone ended up in quite a deep space."

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